Survival Worker Placement Game

You mentioned that the game would play similar to Agricola.

Have you thought about blueprints being made available as game rounds go by?

I like that idea a lot.

It mitigates luck in that a player can't draw a bunch of good cards while another player draws crap.

It allows the game to build up to a strong finish as you can control when certain blueprints become available. This is better than a player drawing the best blueprint on turn 1 and similar scenarios.

It gives the players options. "Do I snag that blueprint now or do I wait another turn?" etc

Dude. Vertical white space. :-)

How about if your library has a few tech trees, perhaps Building, agriculture, and food storage, maybe even weapons and armor, if there is fighting. Each tech tree would have 4-8 levels, depending on how many turns you expect the game to last.

If I allocate a worker to the library, I can immediately jump to the highest "known research" in any one tree. If I already know that tech, I can advance the tree by one level. When I do this, only I can use the new level until the end of the round following this one, when it becomes "known research" (which you indicate by replacing the player-colored token on the tree with a neutral-colored token. So the player who researches a tech level has one full round of exclusive access.

On the other hand, if I don't bother to do research and just wait until others have researched several levels up, then I can jump right to the highest level without bothering with the steps in between.

I like the workers being absent while they "explore." It gives the game a bit of push your luck which works really well in the post-apocalyptic genre.

Do you get to draw one card for every worker you allocate?

Or would sending more workers give you a higher chance of success if you run into obstacles?

Or both?

If you're going to have a wide variety of items in the explore deck, I'm wondering if it would be better to have multiple decks. For instance, if a player wants to find a vehicle, he could go to the Used Car Lot. If he wants to find higher level weaponry, he could go to the National Guard Armory. Etc.

Also, it might be helpful to have 2 zones for exploring to help the players keep track of when they placed their workers. One zone for the initial explore action to remind players to keep the worker on the board and one zone to move the worker into to remind players to pick the worker back up and draw cards.

Have you checked other game similar to see how your mechanics will be different? Have you worked out the mathematical calculations to see how a balance is in place?

It sounds like an interesting game. Perhaps and outer board section will help with keeping track of things during a building phase perhaps or how much resources you have.

Have you seen the mechanics in the new sons of anarchy game?

Check out the gameplay here: https://boardgamegeek.com/video/50260/sons-anarchy-men-mayhem/sons-anarc...

The combat system is really simple and something similar might work for your game.

Also, you might be able to use a similar system of upgrading your workers. In SoA, a recruit upgrades to a club member to give you more benefits and whatnot.

I don't know how the deserting you thing would work practically.
I'm looking at how it could be used strategically (eg: deliberately witholding food from your workers to overpopulate people who have stored food up) but from what I can see that would put you and them at a disadvantage, you wouldn't be able to gather resoruces and they'd have too many people too soon.
Perhaps the other players should have the option to recruit workers who become availible?

Also, if I understand your game properly then what I can see suggests more problems of over-population than under-population which I can't imagine being the case in a post-apocalyptic senario. You need a lot of workers to make stuff happen, they don't die when you stop feeding them, they just go somewhere else, there is limited food so you could end up with lots of "floating" workers. I think that in reality these people would band together and attack others overrunnig their settlements.

As for combat senarios, I'm trying to come up with some which don't involve any stats. Resoruces could be used in combat so that stuff which could be used to make your workers more comfortable and more productive ends up being used to go and fight - that makes it that war becomes an economic exercies and the richest guy wins which we all know is not the case (under breath !ahem, Vietnam, ahahemm!)
Spending resorces on war could set your development back, that coupled with a shortage of workers could make it harder for you to earn more resources and so you'd become more vulnerable to other players.

As for the combat itself, I suggest there are 2 basic types of attack, ranged and melee, ranged attack methods would mean your workers stand a greater chance of surviving a round of combat but they would cost a great deal more resoruces, especially the types you use to make more resorces with, when the ammo runs out your fighters revert to melee combat. Melee combat would work if you can simply "throw men at it", if you don't have enough people it wouldn't be a viable option.
The way I see it you'd need to equip an army before sending them out on a raid, they'd get whatever improvise weapons and armor they could and then you'd need to send so much food per player per turn you estimate they'll be out. Win or lose that food is spent. If the battle lasts longer than you anticipate, your army withdraws and you automatically lose the battle. You can send even more workers to transport additional supplies, but this costs resources (food for those transporting and resorces spent getting the supplies to the battlefield) and there isn't the option for the retreating fighters to happen to 'stumble across' the supplies on the way home and turn back to fight. You end up with a lot of hungry useless people at home and the supplies intended for them are taken by the enemy if you find that your army has to retreat before you can resupply them.

If you win you can loot resoruces from your enemy and don't have to pay for your workers turned fighters to carry it back but they can only carry so much and any extra ammunition (expensive and hard to make) counts as space they could be using to take resources home.
This would make combat a messy and impresonal exercise the point of which is to convert workers into resoruces (if you win) it would however solve the overpopulation I foresaw problem shoudl one arise.